What are "Anti-aliasing" and "Filtering"?

I feel sheepish asking, but I have wondered for years, and don't recall ever seeing a post or other guidance that explains these cryptic boxes in my Settings menu.

There's bilinear and trilinear filtering, etc. Do these choices affect my frame rates? If so, how?

Thanks all,

Mac6737

i7-8700 3.7 GHz

GeForce GTX 1070 Ti; 8GB onboard

AORUS Z370 Gaming 5 LGA 1151 ATX motherboard

16GB RAM

2 TB hard drive

27” MSI gaming monitor, set at 2550 for FSX

On a slow computer, like mine, those settings will have a big affect on FPS. I use Trilinear filtering.

https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/48912/whats-the-difference-between-bilinear-trilinear-and-anisotropic-texture-filte

Anti-aliasing basically fills in the jaggies. Bilinear or trilinear do additional processing on the pixels to improve the picture (tri does more). But as the zipper says, the stronger you set them the more it could affect your system's performance (it takes time and resources to do these).

Here is a Wiki article that points you to lots of info on antialiasing. Here's a Wiki article on trilinear filtering. In each case it's maybe more than you want to know, but it'll provide as much answer as you want beyond what I said above.

And a good way to set things up is to use "nvidia inspector" and use settings as explained here:

https://www.simforums.com/forums/nvi-w7810-driver-setup-fsx-fsxse-and-p3d-update_topic59954.html

And a good way to set things up is to use "nvidia inspector" and use settings as explained here:

https://www.simforums.com/forums/nvi-w7810-driver-setup-fsx-fsxse-and-p3d-update_topic59954.html

This may be valid for FSX, but be warned, Nividia Inspector can consume resources.